Event Essentials

Event Essentials enabled us to take an existing event management platform and configure it to our specific and quite unique needs. The flexibility of their platform is amazing. The EE team configured the system to accommodate our workflow. No more work-arounds. And that is a huge plus. The other farmers market management platforms were not able to be as responsive to customization. Interface is important to me and Event Essentials is quite good. Search and filtering are robust and snappy making it easy to view data as desired. Organizing content under a tab system is very helpful and essentially provides pre-filtered data sets. They have a robust Portal allowing our market vendors to access their accounts, view their applications, their registrations, email history and soon, invoices and payments. Vendors may initiate changes through their portal. And, the system has customized email notification that are associated with specific actions confirming status to vendors and notifying our staff action is required. We develop and manages about 15 seasonal farmers markets. We needed to integrate our management system tying together the two primary functional areas of our company -- Vendor sales & management and Market Operations management. We deal with a large amount of data and lots of moving parts. We needed to integrate a robust daily market reporting system. We needed a robust reporting system with great filters. Event Essentials is doing this for us

There a couple of things that could be better. We do a fair amount of data entry in the field and the display on smaller screens, i.e. iPad Mini's needs some attention. I suspect the EE team will work this out at some point. It is important to us to be able to self manage some back end features. Currently they are giving us that ability incrementally which is probably a good thing. It would be helpful to be able to create report templates, update more text areas, ourselves. That too, I think come in time.

We use EE as our platform for our festival (two-day event w/200,000 + attendees) and it manages three important yet completely different areas for us: volunteers, vendors and our parade.

With over 564 shifts in 120 different positions, we rely on EE to manage the 350+ volunteers for our event with additional management of other smaller events associated with our festival offsite and/or before the festival (i.e. Golf Tournament, stages, etc.).

In our vendor program, we handle roughly 577 vendors of various types such as Arts & Crafts, food, sponsors, non-profits, etc. EE works with us in creating and implementing all 7 of our vendor applications as well as manages all the information as a result.

As for our parade, we average around 75 different entrants ranging from bands and floats to horses and VIPs. It is a varied yet entertaining parade and having EE keep track of each participant is effortless.

As is the case with anything, sometimes things come up and there isn't a feature or option to capture it on EE. That said, whenever it has happened to us, we let EE know and they immediately come up with a solution(s) and tweak our program. I don't consider this a complete con, though, since events are fluid and as such, the software must be as well and EE definitely works well for this.

In my third year in running this event, we brought on Event Essentials. The amount of volunteer hours their software has freed up has given flexibility back to our organization, and made efficiencies possible that we once only dreamed of. Automating portions of our event that have been done by hand for over four decades, has created a sea change in how we are getting the job done. I am so grateful we partnered with the Event Essentials team.

My biggest disappointment was that we didn't get started sooner. I am already looking forward to next year's event knowing we have these tools at our disposal from day one.